by Eric McVey, CIO – Tier4 Advisors
Tier4 Clients are continuously being asked to do more with less, with respect to their IT budgets (CapEx and OpEx). Pressures are mounting for those given the responsibility to procure IT solutions in today’s constantly changing and ever-growing business climate. Given the high standards driven by 24x7x365 needs and five-six 9’s availability requirements, IT leaders are in continual search of new and innovative ways to deliver. With the reality of these lofty goals, today’s CIO/VP of Infrastructure leaders will need to evolve from solely technology experts to strategic leaders that understand the business and financial drivers that will match present and future business requirements.
Case Study #1
A healthcare provider that housed and hosted their data center and application support decided to look outside it’s on-premise facilities for hosting. A business case was created for a managed private cloud solution with Disaster Recovery (DR) fail over built in (currently non-functional). Tier4 managed the RFP process and helped with all the planning, design, and project execution. The project was completed in less than 10 months allowing the client to be fully functional with DR replication in 12 months. The healthcare system then converted the on-premise data center into revenue generating operating rooms and clinical space. The system administrators began a systematic training of becoming cloud engineers; designing and implementing a revenue generating cloud applications and process improvements resulting in cost savings and revenue boosts that were previously unattainable with their old environment.
Case Study #2
A large Fortune 10 healthcare company with 8,000 square feet of development data center space was bursting at the seams with onsite employees and a lack of ample meeting/conference space. Their production sites had ample space to accommodate a consolidation of the development environment, but the company wasn’t sure of the costs to accomplish the project or any alternatives. The company enlisted Tier4 to compare the costs of consolidating the current development environment into existing production sites or move the site to managed colocation (colo). The company chose the Tier4 recommended hybrid model of managed colo for legacy applications and public cloud for open source dev-ops with production of code automatically integrated to QA, Pre-Production and ultimately, Production. The model converted high CapEx investments into OpEx, which allowed the company to convert existing Dev space into cube and meeting space to meet the demands of the business. They were even able to divest much of the Dev data center infrastructure (PDU’s/HVAC, storage, compute, networking) and recoup much of the original CapEx investment.
Moral of the Story
Tier4’s experienced Solutions Architecture team can help you think “out of the box” to create win-win solutions for your business, make you a winner in the eyes of leadership and help make your business more successful. Complete the form below with a brief message to help us get you started on turning OpEx into Revenue.
Tier4 Blog Edition 3: August 30, 2017